As a physician, my inclination is generally to respect scientific authorities—but I found the skepticism from the right more compelling than the trusting attitude of the left. After all, the essence of science is not trust, but doubt.
(An introduction to MAHA can be read here)
Like many Americans, my trust in science was shaken during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We were informed by public health authorities that the novel coronavirus could not possibly have originated from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those who argued in favor of a lab-leak origin were labeled xenophobes and conspiracy theorists. Now, however, it is largely accepted that the virus that caused COVID-19 likely did arise from the Wuhan lab, where gain-of-function research on coronaviruses was actively being pursued at the time.
We were told we needed to lock down society—closing businesses and schools. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, who argued against generalized lockdowns in favor of achieving “herd immunity” (prior to the arrival of COVID vaccines), were dismissed as “fringe” scientists. Those who expressed concerns about the adverse impacts of lockdowns—on childhood socialization and learning, the disproportionate risk faced by “essential workers,” or the overall decimation of economic well-being—were demonized.
We were instructed to wear masks, even homemade cloth ones, and to distance ourselves from others whenever we left our homes. Even gathering outdoors—in a park, at a beach, or on a driveway—without a mask and a six-foot radius was condemned by some. Yet, after conducting my own literature review, I could find no compelling support for either community masking or social distancing.
Like every issue these days, COVID quickly became politicized. Those on the political left tended to post slogans like “Trust the Science,” while those on the political right were skeptical of nearly everything they heard. As a physician, my inclination is generally to respect scientific authorities—but I found the skepticism from the right more compelling than the trusting attitude of the left.
After all, the essence of science is not trust, but doubt. It is not about certainty, but about uncertainty. To even be considered within the realm of scientific inquiry, a premise must be falsifiable. That is, we don’t ask whether it can be proven true, but whether it can be proven false. The quintessential example of a premise that cannot be falsified—and therefore is not within the domain of science—is the existence of God.
To bring this back to COVID: can we prove the coronavirus did not escape from the Wuhan lab? No—we cannot prove that it didn’t. So a confident, blanket denial of lab origin was fundamentally unscientific. Arguments for or against lockdowns, masking, and social distancing are, by contrast, potentially falsifiable—and therefore within the scope of science—but they were never definitively resolved, either before or after the pandemic.
Zooming out even further, based on my broader reading, I’ve come to believe that we haven’t been conducting sound scientific research for many years prior to COVID. Even some fundamental medical research I once trusted now seems suspect. I’ll expand on that in my next entry.
For now, I’ll leave you with a ray of hope—one that I cling to myself- until my next installment. There have been two recent appointments within Health and Human Services that I’m particularly excited about, and I hope they can help move us further along the MAHA pathway.
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